This Fierce Afterglow by Swep Lovitt 978-1-948692-70-0 paper 16 .95 978-1-948692-71-7 ebook 9.99 6 x 9, 68 pp. Poetry January 2021 This Fierce Afterglow, by Swep Lovitt, contains selected poems from his earlier collection, Sometimes the World is Too Beautiful along with 33 new poems. Lovitt’s guiding dictum comes from Ezra Pound: “only emotion endures.” These are poems of family and the day-to-day in the world, all the while burning up in the atmosphere. Swep Lovitt was born and raised in Mississippi. After college, he worked for 30 years in Memphis and now resides in Brookhaven, Mississippi. He played college golf and took a Masters in Modern European History from the University of Southern Mississippi. His publications include two volumes, A Boy’s Face with Swan Wings, and Sometimes the World is Too Beautiful, and 75 poems in magazines and literary journals including: The Texas Review, Mississippi Review, Poem, and Visions-Internatonal. Lovitt has two grown sons and a daughter, each with poems of their own.
i Terrible Sanity by Sam Pickering
978-1-948692-52-6 paper 19.95 978-1-948692-53-3 ebook 9.99 5½ x 8½, 294 pp. essays January 2021 Terrible Sanity is wondrous sanity. Pickering’s essays are acetaminophen for hippish days. “Life doesn’t have a neat beginning and a tidy end,” Roger, a character in V. S. Naipaul’s Half a Life, says. “Life is always going on.” In this collection, Pickering depicts the joy and sadness of life’s going on. He observes that great knowledge often brings small pleasure while the small knowledge that all people experience brings great pleasure. A dental hygienist tells him that every day patients greet her on the street and in stores. “Their faces are always unfamiliar, and I never recognize them,” she says, “but if they opened their mouths wide, I’d know them immediately.”
